THE Ed Burns time-travel flick “A Sound of Thunder” takes us back 65 million years, to approximately the last moment when anyone still thought Ed Burns was talented.

It’s 2055. Burns plays Dr. Travis Ryer, a scientific genius in Chicago who works for a time-traveling safari company that takes rich, dumb clients on tours to dinosaur days.

After zapping themselves into the Cretaceous period, Ryer and Co. lay down a fussy invisible plank, sort of like grandma’s plastic furniture covers, to make sure nobody steps on anything in the ecosystem. Harming a single butterfly or moving a grain of pollen, Ryer warns, can totally alter the course of history, even threaten the existence of the human race.

Shooting dinosaurs is cool, though.

In the prehistoric jungle, the time travelers are startled by an angry roar, and forced to confront what appears to be footage from “Land of the Lost.” The T. rex-like allosaurus they meet is a jerking, arthritic visual effect that not only isn’t as scary as the “Jurassic Park” monsters, it isn’t as scary as the “Jurassic Park” lunch box.

Ryer shoots it with impunity because his sarcastic British-accented computer, T.A.M.I., can pinpoint dinosaurs who are about to die in a few minutes anyway. So pumping a 20-ton Cretaceous animal full of laser ammunition won’t alter history a jot. But hands off that pollen!

The safari company’s profit-mad CEO Charles Hatton is played by a seriously lost Ben Kingsley with Clorox-white hair. Hatton, a zillionaire who seems to own only one suit, has, like the movie, been cutting corners – which is why a time-jump expedition returns 1.3 grams heavier than it left, and Chicago goes as bad as last month’s bananas.

Skyscrapers become blackened hulks, frightening beasts prowl the streets and the weed situation is just out of control. Humanity is about to extinguished.

You would think even Cubs fans wouldn’t put up with this, but the movie can’t afford any crowd-panic scenes. I’ve seen people grow more upset trying to operate their TiVo than Burns’ boys get as they ponder their boo-boo.

Ryer tracks down the inventor of T.A.M.I., Dr. Rand (Catherine McCormack), to find out what went wrong. She explains that when a detail of the evolutionary past is mussed, today doesn’t change all at once: Instead, “time waves” come throbbing along to alter the present in shifts.

While that logical whopper sinks in, it’s time to show us the gorilla-sauruses.

The script, stocked with artifacts on loan from a catchphrase museum (“Is this a great country or what?” “No harm, no foul”) doesn’t attempt even rudimentary twists or character development. And the effects are frequently projected on screens behind the actors, the way they were in drive-in movies from 1956.

“A Sound of Thunder,” from the Dr. Evil-like dry-cleaning mogul Elie Samaha and his Franchise Films (“Battlefield Earth”) is a cautionary tale about how mad tycoons misuse scientific advances, such as CGI.

If 65 million years of evolution have been building up to this movie, then Darwin was wrong. But there’s no intelligent design here either.